Primary Documents - The Siege of Antwerp by Arthur Conan Doyle, October 1914

Conan Doyle in particular
pays emphasis to the British decision to send Marines to assist Belgian
forces in the defence of Antwerp. He is critical of the British
decision ("bold to the verge of rashness"), taken by
Winston
Churchill - who himself travelled to Antwerp to view conditions
for himself.

The Siege of Antwerp

It was at this period that
a great change came over both the object and the locality of the operations.

This change depended upon
two events which occurred far to the north, and reacted upon the great
armies locked in the long grapple of the Aisne. The first of these
controlling circumstances was that, by the movement of the old troops and
the addition of new ones, each army had sought to turn the flank of the
ether in the north, until the whole centre of gravity of the war was
transferred to that region.

A new French army under
General Castelnau, whose fine defence of Nancy had put him in the front of
French leaders, had appeared on the extreme left wing of the Allies, only to
be countered by fresh bodies of Germans, until the ever-extending line
lengthened out to the manufacturing districts of Lens and Lille, where amid
pit-shafts and slag-heaps the cavalry of the French and the Germans tried
desperately to get round each other's flank.

The other factor was the
fall of Antwerp, which released very large bodies of Germans, who were
flooding over western Belgium, and, with the help of great new levies from
Germany, carrying the war to the sand-dunes of the coast. The
operations which brought about this great change open up a new chapter in
the history of the war.

The Belgians, after the
evacuation of Brussels in August, had withdrawn their army into the
widespread fortress of Antwerp, from which they made frequent sallies upon
the Germans who were garrisoning their country.

Great activity was shown
and several small successes were gained, which had the useful effect of
detaining two corps which might have been employed upon the Aisne.
Eventually, towards the end of September, the Germans turned their attention
seriously to the reduction of the city, with a well-founded confidence that
no modern forts could resist the impact of their enormous artillery.

They drove the garrison
within the lines, and early in October opened a bombardment upon the outer
forts with such results that it was evidently only a matter of days before
they would fall and the fine old city be faced with the alternative of
surrender or destruction.

The Spanish fury of Parma's
pikemen would be a small thing compared to the furor Teutonicus
working its evil deliberate will upon town-hall or cathedral, with the aid
of fire-disc, petrol-spray, or other products of Kultur.

The main problem before the
Allies, if the town could not be saved, was to insure that the Belgian army
should be extricated and that nothing of military value which could be
destroyed should be left to the invaders.

No troops were available
for a rescue for the French and British old formations were already engaged,
while the new ones were not yet ready for action. In these
circumstances, a resolution was come to by the British leaders which was
bold to the verge of rashness and so chivalrous as to be almost quixotic.

It was determined to send
out at the shortest notice a naval division, one brigade of which consisted
of marines, troops who are second to none in the country's service, while
the other two brigades were young amateur sailor volunteers, most of whom
had only been under arms for a few weeks.

It was an extraordinary
experiment, as testing how far the average sport-loving, healthy-minded
young Briton needs only his equipment to turn him into a soldier who, in
spite of all rawness and inefficiency, can still affect the course of a
campaign.

This strange force,
one-third veterans and two-thirds practically civilians, was hurried across
to do what it could for the failing town, and to demonstrate to Belgium how
real was the sympathy which prompted us to send all that we had.

A re-enforcement of a very
different quality was dispatched a few days later in the shape of the
Seventh Division of the Regular Army, with the Third Division of Cavalry.
These fine troops were too late, however, to save the city, and soon found
themselves in a position where it needed all their hardihood to save
themselves.

The Marine Brigade of the
Naval Division under General Paris was dispatched from England in the early
morning and reached Antwerp during the night of October 3rd. They were
about 2,000 in number. Early next morning they were out in the
trenches, relieving some weary Belgians. The Germans were already
within the outer enceinte and drawing close to the inner.

For forty-eight hours they
held the line in the face of heavy shelling. The cover was good and
the losses were not heavy. At the end of that time the Belgian troops,
who had been a good deal worn by their heroic exertions, were unable to
sustain the German pressure, and evacuated the trenches on the flank of the
British line. The brigade then fell back to a reserve position in
front of the town.

On the night of the 5th the
two other brigades of the division, numbering some 5,000 amateur sailors,
arrived in Antwerp, and the whole force assembled on the new line of
defence. Mr. Winston Churchill showed his gallantry as a man, and his
indiscretion as a high official, whose life was of great value to his
country by accompanying the force from England.

The bombardment was now
very heavy, and the town was on fire in several places. The equipment
of the British left much to be desired, and their trenches were as
indifferent as their training. Nonetheless they played the man and
lived up to the traditions of that great service upon whose threshold they
stood.

For three days these men,
who a few weeks before had been anything from schoolmasters to
tram-conductors, held their perilous post. They were very raw, but
they possessed a great asset in their officers, who were usually men of long
service. But neither the lads of the naval brigades nor the war-worn
and much-enduring Belgians could stop the mouths of those inexorable guns.

On the 8th it was clear
that the forts could no longer be held. The British task had been to
maintain the trenches which connected the forts with each other, but if the
forts went it was clear that the trenches must be outflanked and untenable.
The situation, therefore, was hopeless, and all that remained was to save
the garrison and leave as little as possible for the victors.

Some thirty or forty German
merchant ships in the harbour were sunk and the great petrol tanks were set
on fire. By the light of the flames the Belgians and British forces
made their way successfully out of the town, and the good service rendered
later by our Allies upon the Yser and elsewhere is the best justification of
the policy which made us strain every nerve in order to do everything which
could have a moral or material effect upon them in their darkest hour.

Had the British been able
to get away unscathed, the whole operation might have been reviewed with
equanimity if not with satisfaction, but, unhappily, a grave misfortune,
arising rather from bad luck than from the opposition of the enemy, came
upon the retreating brigades, so that very many of our young sailors after
their one week of crowded life came to the end of their active service for
the war.

On leaving Antwerp it had
been necessary to strike to the north in order to avoid a large detachment
of the enemy who were said to, be upon the line of the retreat. The
boundary between Holland and Belgium is at this point very intricate, with
no clear line of demarcation, and a long column of British somnambulists,
staggering along in the dark after so many days in which they had for the
most part never enjoyed two consecutive hours of sleep, wandered over the
fatal line and found themselves in firm but kindly Dutch custody for the
rest of the war.

Some fell into the hands of
the enemy, but the great majority were interned. These men belonged
chiefly to three battalions of the 1st Brigade. The 2nd Brigade, with
one battalion of the 1st, and the greater part of the Marines, made their
way to the trains at St. Gilles-Waes, and were able to reach Ostend in
safety. The remaining battalion of Marines, with a number of
stragglers of the other brigades, were cut off at Morbede by the Germans,
and about half of them were taken, while the rest fought their way through
in the darkness and joined their comrades.

The total losses of the
British in the whole misadventure from first to last were about 2,500 men -
a high price, and yet not too high when weighed against the results of their
presence at Antwerp. On October 10th the Germans under General Von
Beseler occupied the city. Mr. Powell, who was present, testifies that
60,000 marched into the town, and that they were all troops of the active
army.